Category: News

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, today announced a new project that will harness the power of independent film to create a global conversation about extreme hunger and poverty. The Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge will spur the production of documentary and narrative films – through a global open call for three-to-eight-minute submissions – that will celebrate imaginative solutions real people are creating to overcome the challenges of extreme hunger and poverty. The project supports Sundance Institute’s mission to empower independent storytellers and connect their work to communities around the world.

How do we quantify the power of story? In this rapid-click era of social media “likes,” video on demand, and unprecedented access to story, the ability to measure impact is more problematic than ever. On Day 3 of the Sundance Film Festival, four panelists with keen–albeit disparate–relationships with story sat on the Power of Story: Weights and Measures panel to begin parsing these questions. 
Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps; Louie Psihoyos, director of The Cove; Jess Search, CEO of BRITDOC; and Paul J.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Park City, UT — Today at a gathering of filmmakers, producers and members of the film distribution industry, at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Keri Putnam, Executive Director, Sundance Institute, and Cathy Schulman, President, Women In Film Los Angeles, announced significant growth of a collaborative initiative designed to achieve gender parity and sustainable careers for women working in filmed entertainment.
Recent expansions of the initiative, which launched two years ago, include a deepened mentorship program, new financing intensives, an expanded network of allied organizations and new and updated research, the results of which were also released today. The study was commissioned by Sundance Institute and Women In Film Los Angeles and was conducted by Stacy L.

Oh, the humanity. Over the years, New Frontier at Sundance, the Festival’s annual showcase for vanguard works of new, immersive and interactive media, has demonstrated not only how the line between our own bodies and the technologies we employ has blurred, but also how the latter, via multiplying screens and cell phones and transmedia, continues to redefine how we think of the former. But a funny thing happened on the way to this year’s “Primordial Pool”: Humanity reasserted itself.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Park City, UT — Innovative documentary films addressing some of the most important issues facing the world today received a boost with a $5 million grant to the Sundance Institute. Christopher Stone, president of the Open Society Foundations, announced the dollar-for-dollar matching grant at the Sundance Film Festival.
“My foundations have long supported arts and culture–especially film–as a means to build and strengthen open societies around the world,” said George Soros,
Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations.

Not only is The Overnighters, Jesse Moss’s U.S. Documentary Competition entry at this year’s Festival, a powerful and complexly moving work of cinema verité filmmaking, it’s also a profoundly honest one.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Last night as part of a vibrant opening night at the Festival, artists and patrons gathered at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley, Utah, for An Artist at the Table to underscore the vital support of Sundance Institute and its filmmakers. The annual event represents a salient reminder that the non-profit Sundance Institute is empowered by its supporters, who make possible the Institute’s yearlong support for filmmakers and their stories. More than 30 Institute-supported artists attended the gathering, which also included the world premiere screening of Whiplash and a post-screening dinner hosted by Mark Ruffalo, with celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis running the kitchen.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Sundance Institute is thrilled to congratulate 7 Sundance-supported films and alumni on their Oscar nominations this morning, led by four films in the Best Documentary Feature category including Directing Award winner Cutie and the Boxer and World Cinema Audience Award winner The Square. Check out all of the Sundance-supported nominees below. 
Best documentary feature
Cutie and the Boxer, Zachary Heinzerling and Lydia Dean Pilcher
Dirty Wars, Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill
The Square, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer
20 Feet from Stardom, Nominees to be determined
Adapted screenplay
Before Midnight, Written by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
Best animated feature film of the year
Ernest & Celestine, Benjamin Renner and Didier Brunner
Best animated short film
Feral, Daniel Sousa and Dan Golden.